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‘I did hear him say that you didn’t have to worry about that.’
Maxie’s eyes flashed. ‘If it takes me until I’m ninety, I’ll pay him back every penny!’
‘He may have hurt your pride, Maxie...but he was most emphatic about not wanting repayment. He sounded sincere to me, and surely you have to give him some credit for his generosity whether you choose to regard it as a debt or otherwise?’ Liz reasoned with an air of frowning confusion. ‘The man has to be seriously interested in you to make such a big gesture on your behalf—’
‘Liz—’ Maxie broke in with a pained half-smile.
‘Do you think he might turn out to be the marrying kind?’ the older woman continued with a sudden teasing smile.
That outrageous question made Maxie’s jaw drop. ‘Liz, for heaven’s sake...are you nuts?’ she gasped. ‘What put that in your mind?’
‘Your godmother’s will—’
‘Oh, that...forget that, Liz. That’s yesterday’s news. Believe me when I say that Angelos Petronides was not thinking along the lines of anything as...well, anything as lasting as marriage.’ Mindful of her audience, Maxie chose her words carefully and suppressed a sigh over the older woman’s romantic imagination. ‘He is not romantically interested in me. He is not that sort of man. He’s hard, he’s icy cold—’
‘He didn’t sound cold on my doorstep...he sounded downright keen! You’d be surprised how much I can pick up from the nuances in a voice.’
Liz was rather innocent in some ways. Maxie really didn’t want to get down to basics and spell out just how a big, powerful tycoon like Angelos Petronides regarded her. As a social inferior, a beautiful body, a target object to acquire for his sexual enjoyment, a live toy. Maxie shrank with revulsion and hated him all over again. ‘Liz...he would be offended by the very suggestion that he would even consider a normal relationship with a woman who’s been another man’s mistress—’
‘But you haven’t been another man’s mistress!’
Maxie ignored that point After the horrendous publicity she had enjoyed, nobody would ever believe that now. ‘To be blunt, Liz...all Angelos wants is to get me into bed!’
‘Oh...’ Liz breathed, and blushed until all her freckles merged. ‘Oh, dear, no...you don’t want to get mixed up with a man like that.’
Maxie lay in bed that night, listening to the distant sound of the traffic. She couldn’t forgive herself for being attracted to a male like Angelos Petronides. It was impossible that she could like anything about him. ‘A woman of your nature,’ he had said. His one little slip. Wanton, available, already accustomed to trading her body in return for a luxurious lifestyle. That was what he had meant. Her heart ached and she felt as if she was bleeding inside. How had she ever sunk to the level where she had a reputation like that?
When Maxie had first been chosen as the image to launch a new range of haircare products, she had been a complete unknown and only eighteen years old. Although she had never had the slightest desire to be a model, she had let her father persuade her to give it a try and had swiftly found herself earning what had then seemed like enormous amounts of money.
However, once the novelty had worn off, she had loathed the backbiting pressure and superficiality of the modelling circuit. She had saved like mad and had planned to find another way to make a living.
But all the time, in the background of her life, her father had continued to gamble. Relying on her income as a safety net, he had, without her knowledge, begun playing for higher and higher stakes. To be fair, Leland’s casino manager had cut off Russ Kendall’s credit line the minute he’d suspected the older man was in over his head. Maxie had met Leland Coulter for the first time the day she settled her father’s outstanding tab at his casino.
‘You won’t change the man, Maxie,’ he had told her then. ‘If he was starving, he would risk his last fiver on a bet. He has to be the one who wants to change.’
After that humiliating episode her father had made her so many promises. He had sworn blind that he would never gamble again but inevitably he had broken his word. And, barred from the reputable casinos, he had gone dangerously down-market to play high-rolling poker games in smoky back rooms with the kind of tough men who would happily break his fingers if he didn’t pay his dues on time. That was when Maxie’s life had come completely unstuck...
Having got himself into serious debt, and learning to his dismay that his daughter had no savings left after his previous demands, Russ had been very badly beaten up. He had lost a kidney. In his hospital bed, he had sobbed with shame and terror in her arms. He had been warned that if he didn’t come up with the money he owed, he would be crippled the next time.
Distraught, Maxie had gone to Leland Coulter for advice. And Leland had offered her an arrangement. He would pay off her father’s gambling debts and allow her to repay him at her leisure on condition that she moved in with him. He had been very honest about what he wanted. Not sex, he had insisted. No, what Leland had craved most had been the ego-boosting pleasure of being seen to possess a beautiful young woman, who would preside over his dinner table, act as his hostess, entertain his friends and always be available to accompany him wherever he went.
It hadn’t seemed so much to ask. Nobody else had been prepared to loan her that amount of money. And she had been so agonisingly grateful that her father was safe from further harm. She hadn’t seen the trap she was walking into. She hadn’t even been aware that Leland was a married man until the headlines had hit the tabloids and taken her reputation away overnight. She had borne the blame for the breakup of his marriage.
‘Jennifer and I split up because she had an affair,’ Leland had admitted grudgingly when Maxie had roundly objected to the anomalous situation he had put her in. ‘But this way, with you by my side, I don’t feel like a fool...all right?’
And she had felt sorry for him then, right through the protracted and very public battle he and his wife had had over alimony and property. Jennifer and Leland had fought each other every inch of their slow path to the divorce court, yet a week before the hearing, when Leland had had a heart attack, the only woman he had been able to think about when he was convinced that he was at his last gasp had, most tellingly, been his estranged wife. ‘Go away, leave me alone... I need Jennifer here... I don’t want her seeing you with me now!’ he had cried in pathetic masculine panic.
And that had hurt. In a crazy way she had grown rather fond of Leland, even of his silly showing-off and quirky little vanities. Not a bad man, just a selfish one, like all the men she had ever known, and she hoped he was happy now that he was back with his Jennifer. But he had used her not only to soothe his wounded vanity but also, and less forgivably, she recognised now, as a weapon with which to punish his unfaithful wife. And Maxie could not forget that, or forgive herself for the blind naivety that had allowed it to happen in the first place. Never, ever again, she swore, would she be used...
Early the next morning, Maxie helped Liz pack. Her friend was heading off to stay with friends in Devon. The fact that her house wouldn’t be left empty during her absence was a source of great relief to Liz. The previous year her home had been burgled and her studio vandalised while she was away.
As soon as she had seen the older woman off, Maxie spent an hour slapping on make-up like war-paint and dressing up in style. Angelos Petronides needed a lesson and Maxie was determined to give it to him.
Mid-morning, she pawned the one piece of valuable jewellery she owned. She had been eleven when she’d found the Victorian bracelet buried in a box of cheap costume beads which had belonged to her mother. She had cried, guessing why the bracelet had been so well concealed. Even in the three short years of her marriage, her poor mother had doubtless learnt the hard way that when her husband was short of money he would sell anything he could get his hands on. Afterwards, Russ would be terribly sorry and ashamed, but by then it would be too late and the treasured possession would be gone. So Maxie had kept the bracelet hidden too.
And now it hurt so much to surrender that bracelet. It felt like a betrayal of the mother she could barely remember. But she desperately needed the cash and she had nothing else to offer. Angelos Petronides had to be shown that he hadn’t bought her or any rights over her by settling Leland’s loan. The sacrifice of her mother’s bracelet, temporarily or otherwise, simply hardened Maxie’s angry, bitter resolve.
Half an hour later, she strolled out of the lift on to the top floor of the skyscraper that housed the London headquarters of the vast Petronides organisation. She spared the receptionist barely a glance. She knew how to get attention.
‘I want to see Angelos,’ she announced.
‘Miss...Miss Kendall?’ The brunette was already on her feet, eyes opened wide in recognition: in a bold scarlet dress that caressed every curve, her spectacular hair rippling in a sheet of gold to her waist, and heels that elevated her to well over six feet, Maxie was extremely noticeable.
‘I know where his office is.’ Maxie breezed on down the corridor, the brunette darting after her with an incoherent gasp of dismay.
She flung wide his office door when she got there. Infuriatingly, it was empty. She headed for the boardroom, indifferent to the squawking receptionist, whose frantic pursuit had attracted the attention of another two secretarial staff.
Bingo! Maxie strolled through the boardroom’s double doors. An entire room full of men in business suits swivelled at her abrupt entry and then gaped. Maxie wasn’t looking at them. Her entire attention was for Angelos Petronides, already rising from his chair at the head of the long polished table, his expression of outrage shimmering in an instant into shocking impassivity. But she took strength from the stunned quality that had briefly lit those fierce black eyes of his.
‘I want to see you now,’ Maxie told him, sapphire-blue eyes firing a challenge.
‘You could wait in Mr Petronides’s office, just through here, Miss Kendall.’ The quiet female intervention came from the slim older woman who had already rushed to cast invitingly wide the door which connected with her employer’s office.
‘Sorry, I don’t want to wait,’ Maxie delivered.
A blazing look of dark, simmering fury betrayed Angelos. It was the reaction of a male who had never before been subjected to a public scene. Maxie smiled sweetly. He couldn’t touch her because she had nothing to lose. No money, no current employment, nothing but her pride and her wits. He should’ve thought of that angle. And, no matter what it took, she intended to make Angelos pay for the state he had put her in the day before.
In one wrathful stride, Angelos reached her side and closed a forceful hand round her narrow wrist. Maxie let out a squeal as if he had hurt her. Startled, he dropped her wrist again. In receipt of a derisive, unimpressed glance that would’ve made a lesser woman cringe, Maxie noted without surprise that Angelos was a quick study.
‘Thank you,’ she said, and meant it, and she strolled through to his big, luxurious office like a little lamb because now she knew he was coming too.
‘Unexpected visitors with unpredictable behaviour are so enervating...don’t you think?’ Maxie trilled as she fell still by the side of his impressive desk.
Angelos swore in Greek, studying her with seething black eyes full of intimidation. ‘You crazy—’ His wide mouth hardened as he bit back the rest of that verbal assault with the greatest of visible difficulty. ‘What the hell are you playing at?’ he growled like a grizzly bear instead.
‘I’m not playing, I’m paying!’ With a flourish, Maxie opened her fingers above his desk and let drop the crushed banknotes in her hand. ‘Something on account towards the loan. I can’t be bought like a tin of beans off a supermarket shelf!’
‘How dare you interrupt a business meeting?’ Angelos launched at her full throttle. ‘How dare you make a scene like that in my boardroom?’
Maxie tensed. She had never heard a man that angry. She had never seen a male with so dark a complexion look that pale. Nor had she ever faced a pair of eyes that slashed like bloodthirsty razors into her.
‘You asked for it,’ she informed him grittily. ‘You embarrassed me yesterday. You made me feel this big...’ With her thumb and her forefinger she gave him a literal demonstration. ‘You made me feel powerless and this is payback time. You picked on the wrong woman!’
‘Is this really the Ice Queen I’m dealing with?’ Angelos responded very, very drily.
‘You’d burn the ice off the North Pole!’ Maxie sizzled back at him, wondering why he had now gone so still, why his naturally vibrant skin tone was recovering colour, indeed why he didn’t appear to be in a rage any more.
‘Do you suffer from a split personality?’
‘Did you really think you knew me just because you were in the same room with me a handful of times?’ Maxie flung her head back and was dumbstruck by the manner in which his narrowed gaze instantly clung to her cascading mane of hair, and then roved on down the rest of her with unconcealed appreciation. It struck her that Angelos Petronides was so convinced that he was an innately superior being and so oversexed that he couldn’t take a woman seriously for five minutes.
Brilliant black eyes swooped up to meet hers again. ‘No way did you ever behave like this around Leland—’
‘My relationship with him is none of your business,’ Maxie asserted with spirit. ‘But, believe me, nobody has ever insulted me as much as you did yesterday.’
‘I find that very hard to believe.’
Involuntarily, Maxie flinched.
Immensely tall and powerful in his superbly tailored silver-grey suit, Angelos watched her, not an informative glimmer of any emotion showing now on that lean, strong, hard-boned face. ‘Since when has it been an insult for a man to admit that he wants a woman?’ he demanded with derision.
‘You frightened the life out of me telling me you’d paid off that loan...you put me under pressure, then you tried to move in for the kill like the cold, calculating womaniser you are!’ Maxie bit out not quite levelly, and, spinning on her heel, she started towards the door.
‘All exits are locked. You’re trapped for the moment,’ Angelos delivered softly.
Maxie didn’t believe him until she had tried and failed to open the door. Then she hissed furiously, ‘Open this door!’
‘Why should I?’ Angelos enquired, choosing that exact same moment to lounge indolently back against the edge of his desk, so cool, calm and confident that Maxie wanted to rip him to pieces. ‘Presumably you came here to entertain me...and, although I have no tolerance for tantrums, you do look magnificent in that dress, and naturally I would like to know why I’m receiving this melodramatic response to my proposition.’
In one flying motion, Maxie spun back. ‘So you admit that that’s what it was?’
‘I want you. It’s only a matter of time until I get what I want,’ Angelos imparted very quietly in the deadly stillness.
Maxie shivered. ‘When the soft soap doesn’t work, weigh in with the threats—’
‘That wasn’t a threat. I don’t threaten women,’ Angelos growled with a feral flash of white teeth. ‘No woman has ever come to my bed under threat!’
Nobody could feign that much outrage. He was an Alpha male and not one modestly given to underestimating his own attractions. But then, he had it all, she conceded bitterly. Incredible looks and sex appeal, more money than he could spend in a lifetime and a level of intelligence that scorched and challenged.
Maxie shot him a look of violent loathing. ‘You think you’re so special, don’t you? You thought I’d be flattered, ready to snatch at whatever you felt like offering...but you’re no different from any of the other men who have lusted after me,’ she countered with harsh clarity. ‘And I’ve had plenty of practice dealing with your sort. I’ve looked like this since I was fourteen—’
‘I’m grateful you grew up before our paths crossed,’ Angelos breathed with deflating amusement.
At that outrageous comment, something inside Maxie just cracked wide open, and she rounded on him like a tigress. ‘I shouldn’t have had to cope with harassment at that age. Do you think I don’t know that I’m no more real to a guy like you than a blow-up sex doll?’ she condemned with raw, stinging contempt. ‘Well, I’ve got news for you, Mr Petronides...I am not available to be any man’s live toy. You want a toy, you go to a store and buy yourself a railway set!’
‘I thought you’d respect the upfront approach,’ Angelos confided thoughtfully. ‘But then I could never have guessed that behind the front you put on in public you suffer from such low self-esteem...’
Utterly thrown by that response, and with a horrendous suspicion that this confrontation was going badly wrong shrilling through her, Maxie suddenly felt foolish.
‘Don’t be ridiculous...of course I don’t,’ she argued with ragged stress. ‘But, whatever mistakes I’ve made, I have no intention of repeating them. Now, I’ve told you how I feel, so open that blasted door and let me out of here!’
Angelos surveyed her with burning intensity, dense lashes low on penetrating black eyes. ‘If only it were that easy...’
But this time when Maxie’s perspiring fingers closed round the handle the door sprang open, and she didn’t stalk like a prowling queen of the jungle on her exit, she simply fled, every nerve in her too hot body jangling with aftershock.
CHAPTER THREE
WHAT had possessed her, what on earth had possessed her? Maxie asked herself feverishly over and over again as she walked. The rain came heavily—long, lazy June days of sunshine finally giving way to an unseasonal torrent which drenched her to the skin within minutes. Since she was too warm, and her temples still pounded with frantic tension, she welcomed that cooling rain.
Something had gone wildly off the rails in that office. Angelos had prevented her quick exit. He had withstood everything she threw at him with provocative poise. In fact, just like yesterday, the more out of control she had got, the calmer and more focused he had become. And he zipped from black fury to outrageous cool at spectacular and quite unnerving speed.
Melodramatic, yes, Maxie acknowledged. She had been. Inexplicably, she had gone off the deep end and hurled recriminations that she had never intended to voice. And, like the shrewd operator he was, Angelos Petronides had trained those terrifyingly astute eyes on her while she recklessly exposed private, personal feelings of bitter pain and insecurity.
It was stress which had done this to her. Leland’s heart attack, the sudden resulting upheaval in her own life, the dreadful publicity, her godmother’s death. The pressure had got to her and blown her wide open in front of a male who zeroed in on any weakness like a predator. Low self-esteem...she did not suffer from low self-esteem!
A limousine drew up several yards ahead of her in the quiet side-street she was traversing. Alighting in one fluid movement, Angelos ran exasperated eyes over her sodden appearance and grated, ‘Get in out of the rain, you foolish woman...don’t you even know to take shelter when it’s wet?’
Swallowing hard on that in-your-face onslaught, Maxie pushed shaking fingers through the wet strands of hair clinging to her brow and answered him with a blistering look of charged defiance. ‘Go drop yourself down a drain!’
‘Will you scream assault if I just throw you in the car?’ Angelos demanded with raw impatience.
A kind of madness powered Maxie then, adrenaline racing through her. She squared up to him, scarlet dress plastered to her fantastic body, the stretchy hemline riding up on her long, fabulous legs. She dared him with her furious eyes and her attitude and watched his powerful hands clench into fists of self-restraint—because of course he was far too clever to make a risky move like that.
‘Why are you following me?’ she breathed.
‘I’m not into railway sets...too slow, too quiet,’ Angelos confessed.
‘I’m not into egocentric dominating men who think they know everything better than me!’ Maxie slung back at him, watching his luxuriant ebony hair begin to curl in the steady rain, glistening crystalline drops running down his hard cheekbones. And she thought crazily, He’s getting wet for me, and she liked that idea.
‘If this is my cue to say I might change...sorry, no can do. I am what I am,’ Angelos Petronides spelt out.
Stupid not to take a lift when she could have one, Maxie decided on the spur of the moment, particularly when she was beginning to feel cold and uncomfortable in her wet clothing. Sidestepping him, enjoying the awareness that she was rather surprising him, she climbed into the limousine.
The big car purred away from the kerb.
‘I decided to make you angry because I want you to leave me alone,’ Maxie told him truthfully.
‘Then why didn’t you stay away from me? Why did you get into this car?’ Angelos countered with lethal precision.
In answer, Maxie made an instinctive and instantaneous shift across the seat towards the passenger door. But, before she could try to jump back out of the car, a powerful hand whipped out to close over hers and hold her fast. The limousine quickened speed.
Black eyes clashed with hers. ‘Are you suicidal?’ Angelos bit out crushingly.
Maxie shakily pulled free of his grasp.
The heavy silence clawed at her nerves. Such a simple question, such a lethally simple, clever question, yet it had flummoxed her. If she had truly wanted to avoid him, why had she let something as trivial as wet clothes push her back into his company?
Angelos extended a lean brown hand again, with the aspect of an adult taking reluctant pity on a sulky child. ‘Come here,’ he urged.
Without looking at him again, Maxie curled into the far corner of the back seat instead. His larger-than-life image was already engraved inside her head. She didn’t know what was happening to her, why she was reacting so violently to him. Her own increasing turmoil and the suspicion that she was adrift in dangerously unfamiliar territory frankly frightened her. Angelos Petronides was bad news in every way for a woman like her. Avoiding him like the plague was the only common sense response. And she should’ve been freezing him out, not screaming at him.
With a languorous sigh, Angelos shrugged fluidly out of his suit jacket. Without warning he caught her hand and pulled her to him. Taken by surprise, Maxie went crazy, struggling wildly to untangle herself from those powerful fingers. ‘Let go! What are you trying to—?’
‘Stop it!’ Angelos thundered down at her, and he released her again in an exaggerated movement, spreading both arms wide as if to demonstrate that he carried no offensive weapon. ‘I don’t like hysterical women.’
‘I’m not...I’m not like that.’ Maxie quivered in shock and stark embarrassment as he draped his grey jacket round her slim, taut shoulders. The silk lining was still warm from his body heat. The faint scent of him clung to the garment and her nostrils flared. Clean, husky male, laced with the merest tang of some citrus-based lotion. She lowered her damp head and breathed that aroma in deep. The very physicality of that spontaneous act shook her.
‘You’re as high-strung as some of my racehorses,’ Angelos contradicted. ‘Every time I come close you leap about a foot in the air—’
